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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2543 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm reattempting Scruton's Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Has been collecting dust for far too long.

I tried to read A Tale of Two Cities and I just can't get it. It just bores me so much. It's on practically every list of "best novels ever", and I feel weird about it. And it's not like my tastes are opposed to the general direction - I like historic novels, I've read Dickens before (though a long time ago), and I enjoyed a lot of other "classic" works on the same "best ever" lists - but this one somehow just does not "click" for me. Not sure if I'll try to get through it or just put it aside and try again, maybe in several years.

Close Reads covered A Tale of Two Cities recently. They were similarly not super into it, but I find it easier to get through a book with a group of people, especially people who are able to give good context, background, and additional insights I miss.

For A Tale of Two Cities, they recommend reading the book like a series of vignettes. Dickens layers each scene in imagery and significance. Some scenes are better than others. Ultimately I found it worth it to finish the book, though I have no desire to reread it.

I just finished the last book in the Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin and feel compelled to ramble about it. The reason why I picked it up in the first place was I have been completely divorced from the state of modern sci fi/fantasy and was still under the impression that a Hugo award is a mark of quality. Each book in the trilogy won a Hugo, which is a first, so I was looking forward to it, and I checked all three from the library before going on a trip I knew would include a lot of downtime I'd rather not spend doomscrolling. It's very mediocre, not bad just kinda whatever, and had I done any digging at all into it or the state of the Hugos I should have known. From Wikipedia:

Jemisin's novel The Fifth Season was published in 2015, the first of the Broken Earth trilogy. The novel was inspired in part from a dream Jemisin had and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri about the death of Michael Brown.[27][28] The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first African-American writer to win a Hugo award in that category.

So a black woman wrote a fantasy book about racism and quite literally black girl magic, and was rewarded handsomely for it by the Hugos (and had it optioned by Sony for 7 figures). In it, some people are gifted in orogeny, allowing them to manipulate the earth, and stop things like volcanoes and earthquakes. Someone who is skilled in this is really quite useful, but also obviously dangerous. As such, there's a class of people called Guardians who find new orogenes, and train them at Hogwarts in order to control them. If they try and run away or can't be controlled, they are killed. Normal people, by and large, hate them, and will try and kill them if discovered even if they have literally saved their communities in one way or another, and even if they are firmly under the yoke of the Guardians. They've even got their own slur. It's a bit... on the nose. Also a lot of characters are bisexual for some reason.

Again it wasn't a bad read. I'm not much of an anti-woke crusader myself; I find it mildly annoying when I realize what is going on, that's about it. But I was shocked it won a Hugo, and apparently they've been like this since like 2010?

Anyway I'm looking to read some dumb male-oriented sci fi if you guys have recommendations.

Anything by Peter F Hamilton, really.

Hell, his first trilogy basically starts off with an artificially-engineered psychic British detective hooking up with a hot, stacked redhead and then going off to have adventures employed by a British megacorp in a post-global warming apocalyptic Briton.

and apparently they've been like this since like 2010?

Yes, as mostly everything else mass-cultural, Hugos are woke now. If you want many sad details, look up "Sad Puppies". Obviously, unless you want the woke side of the story, in places other than Wokepedia. But be warned, it won't make you feel any better.

I liked The Commonwealth Saga quite a bit.

Hammer’s Slammers by David Drake

Anything sci-fi by John Ringo

The Compleate Bolo by Keith Laumer, plus any Bolo anthologies.

And while it’s not sci-fi, it is a pulp short story collection that is all set in vaguely sci-fi situations:

The Eye of Sounnu by Schuyler Hernstrom

Finished Die Staufer. Good read.

Bought and read Astérix en Lusitanie (in German) together with my daughter. She enjoyed it, though I doubt that she understood anything. I thought it was quite decent, though some of the social commentary was tiresome. Yes, "Elonmus" goes to an orgy of rich people, how witty. The multi-page joke where a Garum marketing guy talks to his coporate henchmen using a bunch of latinisms I found comparatively well-done.

Then I picked a book of my shelf at random. It's a maths-physics-chemistry textbook. I open it every evening, read a page, nod sagely, go "yeah, I sure remember that from my studying days and I can still pretend to understand it, with some effort", then close it and immediately forget what I read. Just kidding, I do actually enjoy it and am surprised by how well most of the information sticks. It seems I have not entirely lost my ability to learn. Though of course it's all fairly basic stuff that I have in fact learned before at some point, so the challenge factor is low.

I also picked two other books from my shelf, one about the history of every town, village, hamlet and ruin in the larger region, going back to the earliest records, and the other about local picaresque tales. But I haven't really started on either, preferring for now to subject myself to the aforementioned science textbook.

I didn't realise they were still making new Asterix books.

"Elonmus" goes to an orgy of rich people, how witty

I had a look on Wikipedia, it says the character is called Upwardlimobilus (I assume that's in the English version). Is "Elonmus" your own re-naming? It's hard to tell when apparently there is also a character called Nellia Furtado. Seems odd to put in these kinds of contemporary pop references.

Each localization of the Astérix books uses different naming schemes for the secondary characters.

I get that, I think the successful translation of the character names between languages is pretty essential to its success. But "Elonmus" is so specific and current and implicitly culture-warry. It takes you out of the story. Maybe it works better in German..?

No, it does not. It's just as jarring in German.

FWIW, I don't think we're talking about the same character. Upwardlimobilus, in the German version, is simply named Fetterbonus - "fat bonus". Works, since he's fat. Elonmus is just a name on the guest list for his orgy.

The Game, by the recently departed Ken Dryden. It has a reputation as unquestionably the best hockey book of all time, and possibly the greatest sports book of all time, and while I understand where this comes from, the whole thing comes off as a bit overrated. The first thing you need to know about Ken Dryden is that he isn't a typical athlete. His career was remarkably short for a Hall of Famer. He was 23 when he made his debut in the 1971 playoffs, winning the Conn Smythe Trophy and the Stanley Cup before he was technically even a rookie. He retired at age 31 following the 1978–1979 season. He only played 7 full seasons and the aforementioned playoffs of an eighth, having sat out the 1973–1974 season due to a contract dispute and his desire to finish his legal training, and won Stanley Cups in six of those seasons.

As Dryden didn't have a typical career, it stands to reason that he wouldn't write a typical sports book. Athletes usually write standard memoirs, talking about their childhoods and how they got into sports before spending the bulk of the time on their professional careers, and then a nod towards their personal lives and what they've been up to since retiring. Then there's the tell-all memoir, which is exactly the same as the standard memoir except the athlete has some controversial aspect to his life and there's a chapter that deals with the controversy. The Game touches on some of this but doesn't dwell on it; if you didn't know anything about Dryden's career before reading it the book isn't going to fill in the blanks for you. Instead, he ostensibly focuses on a week in the 1978–1979 season but really uses it as a jumping off point to discuss various subjects related to being a professional athlete.

Well, more like related to be being Ken Dryden, because I don't see most athletes having his level of insight, and, as I said, his experience was atypical. One gets the impression that he didn't particularly want to be a pro athlete and just sort of lucked into the job. Almost every review of this book talks about how it discusses "the pressures of being a pro athlete", and while this is certainly part of it, this aspect is overstated, as the pressure he describes isn't universal. The book's biggest strength is that Dryden is candid to a degree that was unheard of at the time. He talks about how being part of a dynasty directly led to his decision to retire, as the thrill of winning had been replaced by the fear of not living up to expectations. He talks about how players have to push for higher salaries even though it ruins the game. Most importantly, he talks about how being a professional athlete necessarily means peaking early in life and becoming alienated from having any semblance of a normal life progression. As he puts it, you go from extended adolescence to premature middle age. When he retires at 31, he knows that whatever he does with the rest of his life he will always be "former" or "ex". He realized that he didn't even want to be a lawyer but always stuck to the idea so he could pretend that hockey was just what he was doing while he could before he got his real career on track, but as the reality of not having hockey becomes clear he admits that was just an excuse.

And he's aware of all the contradictions. The book's second greatest strength is that he knows how to write, but he's aware that he has the image of an intellectual, so of course this will be expected of him since people have been calling him "articulate" his whole career. And he's aware of how image can be manufactured by both players and the media (at one point he says that if you want to cultivate an image as a theatergoer then go to the theater once after a good game and tell a journalist about it, and people will assume you're really into theater). And he's aware that most NHL players have to work hard to stay on rosters and that the ones who are good, like teammate Guy LaFleur, have a "love of the game" that he simply doesn't.

The reason I say this is overrated is because, for all his insight, there's nothing universal about anything he says. Most athletes are lucky to win one championship and don't have to deal with the expectations that come with having won five. There simply aren't than many dynasties, and even on dynasties, most of the players are only there for a short period. He says early in the book that retirement was a difficult thing to consider because he had always assumed that his playing days would end when a coach told him in the fall that he didn't make the team; but that didn't happen, and now he has to decide how and when to make his exit. Well, the same is true for most pro players; they don't make the team out of camp, or get waived, or don't get signed to new contracts, or whatever. Even the ones lucky enough to announce their retirements have usually played as long as they realistically can. I could go on, but very little of Dryden's concerns would appear to be common to pro athletes as a whole.

The other reason it's overrated is because it just isn't that fun to read. Dryden is a good writer, but he's such a good writer that he's more quotable than readable. When everything a guy says is profound it's hard to just get lost in the book. I think sportswriters overrate this because they're usually nerds who can't play sports at all and spend their careers trying to make sense of guys who live up to "dumb jock" stereotypes, so when a guy like Dryden comes along and shows he's one of them they all start drooling over his profound insights and pretty words. There are also several boring sections where he's not musing on personal stuff and trying to give one the atmosphere of a dressing room by quoting players and narrating the antics and whatnot, and it's pretty boring. Maybe when I'm done with this I'll have rated it higher, but I don't know what this book is supposed to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The reason I say this is overrated is because, for all his insight, there's nothing universal about anything he says.

This is not surprising, goaltenders have the reputation of being weirdo loners as far as pro athletes go.

That said, I've already wanted to read that book for a while and none of your caveats seem like deal-breakers to me. I'll probably pick it up soon.

Recently finished: Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth. Basically, his thesis is that modern Western society (in its entirety - government, economy, social mores, etc) is destroying the things that enable humanity to thrive - think things like cultural traditions, connection to a particular place going back generations, spiritual practices, and so on. He personifies this as a machine which rips up all in its path, destroying what those things once were and remaking them in a fashion to suit the machine's purpose of expanding without end.

I am not sure what I think of the book. I think at the most basic level, Kingsnorth is right that there's something which has gone wrong with Western society. It hasn't been without benefit (and he himself admits this freely), but we seem to have lost some measure of basic human joy and mental flourishing along the way. I'm not so certain I agree with his framing of the trend as a coherent entity. It's kind of like the idea of Moloch - rhetorically powerful, but also factually inaccurate. And I definitely disagree with some of the author's ideas - at one point he argues that the Machine is quite literally demonic in origin, which I don't believe at all (we humans are quite capable of destroying ourselves without supernatural influence). So I guess I found the book interesting, but not without its flaws (or at least flaws as I see them).

Currently reading the Divine Comedy. I've had a copy of it forever, but am just now getting around to it (mostly because a friend really encouraged me to read it, at least Inferno). It's been interesting. Obviously it's one of the major works of the Western canon, and has had a ton of influence over our culture. So seeing the original first-hand is pretty cool. I think I'm looking forward to Purgatorio and Paradiso more, just because I know absolutely nothing about them, but am enjoying Inferno as well. It's pretty funny the extent to which the work is Dante just showing everyone he dislikes in hell. I can't imagine it made him many friends at all, though perhaps he didn't care because he was exiled anyway. I find poetry kind of a slog to read (even short poems like Robert Frost etc), so it's certainly a challenge to read long-form poetry like this. But hopefully I'm able to stick to it because I do want to finish a classic of this magnitude.

I'm not so certain I agree with his framing of the trend as a coherent entity.

I would frame it as nothing more than the result of imposed religious tolerance. In order to stop the religious persecutions that were commonplace in the second half of the last millenium, Europeans and their descendents, and particularly city-dwellers, had to blunt some of their innate moral instincts: those that would chafe at the presence of heretics and apostates. For a few centuries this gave them a big boost, but long term it turns out some of those moral instincts might have been load bearing to civilisation, as we find ourselves atomizing into individualism under a universalist philosophy that forbids us from creating an exclusive shared identity.

That's an interesting way to look at it. What's kind of ironic is we don't seem to have actually rid ourselves of those instincts, so much as changed what it's acceptable to apply them to. Like, look at how the left treats JK Rowling for example. There's precious little difference (except for no violence) between the way people treat her, and the way someone in the 15th century would've treated a heretic. Perhaps those instincts are too deeply embedded in our genes to be eliminated completely.

The justification for the hatred she gets fits within the restrictive moral framework of the people Jonathan Haidt identified in The Righteous Mind as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic): she's evil because she's harming trans people. WEIRD pretty much only see the care/harm and fairness/unfairness as far as morality go.

Personally I am/was raised WEIRD, and while I cannot express why specifically, some examples Haidt used to test moral foundations outside of harm and fairness still trigger primitive negative emotion in me even if I cannot find a way within myself to condemn it intellectually. The real, original moral instinct as to why JK Rowlings is so hated might still be because she's undermining the consensus (not going along with the group is an affront to the loyalty moral foundation), or from expressing ideas considered sacrilegeous, but having a negative reaction to someone because of that is not allowed by our universalist mindset, so it has to be laundered as her being harmful.

About halfway through The Story of a New Name. The story is starting to pick up now.

Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank. Thorough research from Both Sides helps the reader better understand the decision to drop The Bomb. It builds on scaffolding that allows the reader to judge how justified the decision was in terms of what relevant actors did know, what they didn't, and some of what they should have. It is a darn convincing defense.

I returned to sci-fi while traveling and on vacation recently. First was Rendevous with Rama which was a quick read and enjoyable. The plot is currently in the news. An object flies into into the solar system hurtling towards the Sun. Except in the book this is a massive 50km x 20km not-comet. The reader goes along with the only team available to check it out.

The second was The Mote in God's Eye which could have cut a bunch. Maybe I am a curmudgeon or I take for granted sci-fi was once new and unrefined. The time it spent thinking about aliens was nice. It has the old school sci-fi autistic charm where the authors forget to include a characters arc then suddenly remember to throw something in. It wasn't a slog, but could've been better.

Finished What Not. Spoiler: The heroine followed her heart and the oiks rose up and bloodlessly unseated the Minister for Brains. Possibly the lowest jeopardy dystopia I've ever read.

Now reading a Christina Rosetti collection, mostly for Goblin Market but it's short enough that I might as well finish it. Recurring themes of nature and the perils of being a sensitive teenage woman (and not a man-stealing whore like that skank bitch Maude).

Dissonance: Unbound Book 1 by Nicoli Gonnella.

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